Ethnicity and the Pragmatic Strategies in American Christian Sermons

This study is concerned with the pragmatic aspects in American Christian sermons by White-American and African-American preachers. The study aims at detecting the noticeable differences between preachers in terms of the pragmatic strategies and tracing the social variable of ethnicity. The data under scrutiny are selected from official websites in forms of videos transcribed by the researchers and then analysed both qualitatively and quantitatively. The two types of analysis help the study to arrive at a variety of conclusions, the most central of which is there are considerable differences between the White-American and African-American preachers regarding their use of the pragmatic strategies. It also concludes that the social variable of ethnicity affects the African-American preachers more than their counterpart.